A regular DVD with nearly 36 gigs of stuff on it? HOW?!?!

[gastrof]

Correction from the title.

Has anyone here ever heard of a DVD holding nearly 38 gigs of material?

A friend works for a local Emergency Services agency, and asked me to copy a DVD they use in training the public in "First Aid" type stuff.

I went to copy it, and the software ran into a problem. (ImgBurn seems to ignore copyguard. At least I think it does. Anyway, I checked to see what the problem was. Maybe a dual layer disc?)

Checking the contents of the disc, the Video TS folder read as having over 40 MILLION bytes in it, the GB number being 37.6.

Obviously, I'm not going to have an easy time of it making a digital copy of THIS disc. (An earlier one copied perfectly. This close to being done, why am I surprised?)

Does the amount of data showing as being on this disc make ANY sense at all?

How could even a dual layer disc have that much on it?

At first I thought maybe he'd given me a Blu-Ray disc to copy, but then I realized my DVD drive doesn't take them, so it shouldn't have been able to read the disc at all if it was Blu-Ray.

Any ideas?

Since the thing has a complicated menu, I don't even know that I'll be able to make an analog copy of any kind.

I suppose if I did have a Blu-Ray drive and some blank discs, maybe this wouldn't be a problem (provided they had a portable B-R player to take out with them).

Again, any ideas on why this disc is reading as so big?

[edDV]

I've run into similar copy protection phenomena. If you have enough disk space, you will see that the same VOBs are copied over and over. Just isolate a single set of VOBs and re-author the 4.3GB DVD.

[El Heggunte]

....

Again, any ideas on why this disc is reading as so big?

A purposefully-corrupted ISO/UDF filesystem.

[jman98]

Use the free version of DVDFab to rip it and then copy that. Yes, this kind of copy protection is bad sector copy protection. Commercial copy protection programs like ARCCOS use this. I am REALLY surprised that a training video would pay for this kind of protection. Most Hollywood studios won't even pay for it. Since you see that I told you to use DVDFab to rip the disc that means it can be defeated. AnyDVD can also defeat it.

Some of the DVD shrinking programs will either barf on the corrupted filesystem and fail to work or they will over work and compress the video down to insane and potentially unwatchable quality levels. That's why it's used.

[jagabo]

Has anyone here ever heard of a DVD holding nearly 38 gigs of material?

Table of contents in a 200 page book:

Chapter 1 - pages 1-200
Chapter 2 - pages 1-200
Chapter 3 - pages 1-200
Chapter 4 - pages 1-200
Chapter 5 - pages 1-200
Chapter 6 - pages 1-200
Chapter 7 - pages 1-200
Chapter 8 - pages 1-200
Chapter 9 - pages 1-200

total pages 1800?

[gastrof]

Has anyone here ever heard of a DVD holding nearly 38 gigs of material?

Table of contents in a 200 page book:

Chapter 1 - pages 1-200
Chapter 2 - pages 1-200
Chapter 3 - pages 1-200
Chapter 4 - pages 1-200
Chapter 5 - pages 1-200
Chapter 6 - pages 1-200
Chapter 7 - pages 1-200
Chapter 8 - pages 1-200
Chapter 9 - pages 1-200

total pages 1800?

I'm afraid I don't get the way you're explaining this, but thanks for the attempt.

[jagabo]

Has anyone here ever heard of a DVD holding nearly 38 gigs of material?

Table of contents in a 200 page book:

Chapter 1 - pages 1-200
Chapter 2 - pages 1-200
Chapter 3 - pages 1-200
Chapter 4 - pages 1-200
Chapter 5 - pages 1-200
Chapter 6 - pages 1-200
Chapter 7 - pages 1-200
Chapter 8 - pages 1-200
Chapter 9 - pages 1-200

total pages 1800?

I'm afraid I don't get the way you're explaining this, but thanks for the attempt.

Different file entries refer to the same data on the disc. Windows determines how much data is on the disc by adding up the sizes of all the files. But the disc cannot hold more than 9 GB of data. Period.

[MOVIEGEEK]

I'm also surprised they used ARCCOS on a training DVD. If DVDFab or AnyDVD won't work then try IsoBuster.

[gastrof]

Guys-

DVD Fab worked great.

Thank you.

Seemed to be a perfect copy of the disc. (I didn't watch the whole thing, but what I saw, it looked all right.)

I do wonder tho'-

I tried twice, using not only the first option (which is what worked and copied the disc identically), but also using the "rip" feature.

It copied only one video off the disc, no menu, and it plastered a transparent "This is trial software" thing on the screen.

I was glad the first attempt had worked, but up to now had thought "ripping" was a term meant to describe the whole DVD being copied to a hard drive.

Didn't seem to happen that way.

Can anyone clarify?

One other thing-

PLEASE tell me that the other method, the one that DID make an identical copy...

Tell me that NOWHERE on that disc is the "This is trial software" thing. It wasn't on any of the menus or vid bits I looked at, but I'd hate to think they'll find it on part of the disc at some future time.

[fritzi93]

I was glad the first attempt had worked, but up to now had thought "ripping" was a term meant to describe the whole DVD being copied to a hard drive.

You're almost right, ripping means to copy to hard drive (and usually decrypt as well). Ripping can be selective or whole disc.

DVDFab, OTOH, misuses the term, conflating ripping with conversion and/or changing container. Can't tell you exactly what Fab did, you'd have to pay more attention to settings and tell us. Copy function is what you want, either whole disc or main movie. Use something besides Fab if you want to do a re-encode or repackage.

Your backup should have no watermark or anything else not on the original. Unless they've introduced it recently.

Some people are ready to give up on the fact that many people misuse the term "rip", but how the hell can we communicate with any precision if we can't be sure of the meanings of terms? It's particularly irritating that Fab does this. JMO.

[Noahtuck]

@ OP....

Oy Vey.....

[hello_hello]

MakeMKV will also copy those types of DVDs if you're happy with an MKV container.

I was glad the first attempt had worked, but up to now had thought "ripping" was a term meant to describe the whole DVD being copied to a hard drive.

You're almost right, ripping means to copy to hard drive (and usually decrypt as well). Ripping can be selective or whole disc.

DVDFab, OTOH, misuses the term, conflating ripping with conversion and/or changing container.

That's nothing, you should read the description of the DVD Ripping forum here to see what's included under the heading "ripping".

[jman98]

As far as we all know, DVDFab is fully functional and not crippled in any way in its trial version. But as we do not make a habit of downloading and using the trial versions just for the heck of it (those who want a commercial ripper here have already bought it or AnyDVD) we cannot give you a 100% absolute certain guarantee that they are not watermarking anything. But they've never done it in the past and we have no reports of them doing it now. I don't think it would even be logical for them to start doing it, but no, we're not going to download a trial version and test it out just for you. Either watch your video to be sure, buy DVDFab, or stop obsessing about it. Continuing to ask for absolute guarantees we cannot give you is pointless.

[Ai Haibara]

I think there was an example in a semi-recent post here on VH where DVDFab was indeed watermarking video it converted, probably after the usual DVDFab trial period. It even used the DVDFab monkey logo in the watermark.

Problem is, I haven't yet been able to find the topic, again. It was a closed topic, though.